Celebrity chef and her team charged like mad in four-year ‘free for all’

Charles Saatchi paid annual credit card bills of 1.2-million British pounds run up by his ex-wife Nigella Lawson and five aides for “personal spending” on his family, a court was told Thursday.

He paid the bills in full by direct debit each month without scrutinising where the money was going, even though employees were sometimes spending more than 5,000 pounds on designer clothes in single transactions, it was disclosed.

One aide put the 12,500-pound bill for her wedding reception on Mr Saatchi’s credit card, the court heard. Others used the cards to pay for health spas, dental work and visits to the hairdresser.

Details of the extraordinary amounts of money spent by Miss Lawson and the couple’s personal assistants were exposed at the trial of two Italian sisters accused of fraudulently spending at least 685,000 pounds on Mr Saatchi’s credit cards.

Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo are alleged to have treated themselves to a four-year “free for all” of spending without being authorised to do so. They both deny fraud, and are expected to claim that Miss Lawson agreed the payments, partly in return for their silence over her alleged drug use.

Isleworth Crown Court, west London, heard that the sisters were two of five aides to Miss Lawson and Mr Saatchi who had credit cards linked to Mr Saatchi’s personal account.

Between them they averaged pounds 100,000 a month. The court was told that Elisabetta, who allegedly defrauded the couple out of 105,000 pounds over a four-year period, spent less on the credit card than Anzelle Wasserman, another assistant who is not under suspicion.

Ms Wasserman put a payment for 12,500 pounds at the Saatchi Gallery Mess on the credit card, said to have been the bill for her wedding reception.

Mr Saatchi’s finance director, Rahul Gajjar, suggested that the payment may have been “gifted by Nigella, it could have been authorised”.

Mr Gajjar told the court that Miss Lawson’s spending on the credit cards averaged pounds 7,000 per month. Francesca, 35, averaged 48,000 pounds per month in the four months to June 2012, and her 41-year-old sister averaged pounds 28,000.

The sisters’ monthly spending was in excess of their annual salaries, which was 28,000 pounds for Francesca and pounds 25,000 for Elisabetta.

They also used Mr Saatchi’s personal minicab account for 105 journeys between them in a single month.

She is said to have admitted to Mr Gajjar that 33,893 pounds of that was “unauthorised”.

This included 5,385 pounds spent in one transaction at the clothes store Miu Miu, 2,650 pounds spent at Prada in one day and 2,300 pounds at Louis Vuitton. Other large transactions included thousands of pounds on transatlantic air fares and stays at hotels in New York and the Ritz in Paris.

Elisabetta is said to have spent 4,850 pounds without permission in the same month.

Asked whether the credit card bills were checked, Mr Gajjar said: “The credit cards went through Charles’s personal account so they weren’t analysed.” He said the cards issued to Miss Lawson and the five personal assistants were for “personal spending for Nigella and the family”.

Mr Saatchi became suspicious about the sisters’ spending in June last year when he discovered one of them ordered a taxi on his account to go to a polo match in Berkshire.

Mr Gajjar suggested to Elisabetta, originally the couple’s nanny, and Francesca, originally their housemaid, that they could continue living rent-free in a flat owned by Miss Lawson and pay back the money in monthly increments. But Elisabetta became “hysterical” and “said they were being treated worse than Filipino slaves”.